How to Study Without Sacrificing Your Mental Health- Sinclair Prep Study Tips #3

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Do you have what it takes to be the top student? How far are you willing to go to secure that spot?
The game is on and we have to study hard and betray harder!

Welcome back to Sinclair Prep Study Tips, a mini-series I’m hosting on the blog inspired by Katie Zhao’s upcoming dark academia YA novel How We Fall Apart that’s out today! Happy book birthday! 🎉 Get ready to learn how you can study without sacrificing your mental health so we can enjoy the dark academia aesthetics without the inevitable downfall…

How We Fall Apart

Related: My Most Anticipated 2021 Releases

Now, for the past 2 weeks, I’ve shared my best study tips and how to create your ultimate study playlist. This week, I want to talk about how to be the top student without sacrificing your mental health. I know, suffering is a quintessential part of the dark academia aesthetic, but we’re not characters in books being tortured by our writers. We can make better choices!

If you missed the other posts in this series, you can find them here:

• My Ultimate Study Playlist and How to Create Yours – Sinclair Prep Study Tips #1
• How to Study Efficiently and Ace Your Exams – Sinclair Prep Study Tips #2

Now without further ado, let’s talk about academia and mental health.

Is Dark Academia just Aesthetic Hustle Culture?

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with enjoying dark academia. Yes, there are parts of it we should engage with critically and better people than I have talked about some of the problematic aspects of the trend. I highly recommend this video by Rowan Ellis as some food for thought.

However, there is definitely a hustle culture vibe to dark academia. Long hours and sleepless nights, all in the pursuit of greater knowledge. I’m not going to lie, motivational study content has been hugely helpful in my academic career. Imagining I’m at some prestigious institution, studying away to be the top student has a certain appeal to it. But we should never sacrifice our mental health, especially not for aesthetics.

Today, I want to talk about how to realistically be the kind of person who studies and gets good grades (and occasionally participates in secret rituals or solves a murder, if that’s your thing) without having a nervous breakdown every night!

Taking Care of Your Mental Health as a Student

1. Know Your Worth

You are not just your grades or academic achievements. You are a full person with many facets. It’s okay to care about academics but try to have hobbies and interests outside of it, too! Learn and believe yourself to be loveable regardless of your grades. They do not define you.

In a similar vein, you have every right to be in the classroom. Academic institutions are often fraught with less than ideal power structures and there are teachers who will try to abuse them. If you know your worth and what you value, you are less easy to manipulate and influence.

A personal anecdote on this: I had a terrible English teacher in my final years. She hated me (and to be honest, the feeling was mutual). Having this woman, who I knew wouldn’t judge me on my abilities but her personal feelings about me, be in charge of my final grades sucked. What got me through those two years was a) knowing that I deserved respect, b) knowing my grades were not a reflection of my as a full person and c) reminding myself that I could only try my best. In all honesty, she was a terrible teacher and treated us students unfairly whenever she could.

In the end, I put in a lot of work, mostly out of spite. My goal was to produce work that was so good she couldn’t possibly give me a bad grade for it. Luckily, it worked! But I dreaded every week because I knew I had to attend her class. If I hadn’t firmly believed in my skills and that I deserved the good grades for them, I wouldn’t have made it through that class. There is a lesson in here somewhere, I think.

2. Ask For Help

If you’re struggling, ask for help. This is probably the hardest one because asking for help is hard! Admitting you don’t know or can’t do something is difficult, we’re often taught that not being immediately perfect at something is some kind of personal flaw. It isn’t, it’s normal. After all, we’re here to learn and grow! So if you don’t understand something in class, ask. Use office hours. Ask friends for help. Academia can be super competitive and an absolute frenemies zone, we know where that got Jamie Ruan…

This extends to asking for help for your mental health! Therapy is your friend! We can study hard and betray harder while looking after our mental health, I promise. If you feel like you need professional help, seek it out. Depending on where you live and what your circumstances are, this might be harder than it should be and I’m so sorry if that’s your situation.

3. Take Breaks

Allow yourself to rest, and I mean truly rest. Do something you enjoy, something that doesn’t need to produce anything, that doesn’t have to be perfect. I try to make time for art that’s just for myself. Am I a good artist? Not really, but that’s exactly the point. It’s very comforting and freeing to spend some time on something that is fun and that I’m bad at. I have found immense value in creating spaces for myself to fail and not feel guilty about it or let it define me. Maybe this is helpful for you, too.

4. Journal

This might seem like a bit of a basic tip, but hear me out. Journaling is one of the tools (apart from therapy) that has helped my mental health the most. It’s free and effective. But why should you journal?

• It helps you organise your thoughts. If you’re like me, your brain is constantly working and throwing around thoughts like ping pong balls. That is not helpful when you’re trying to focus. Writing your thoughts down gets them out of your head and frees up space.
• It makes you less overwhelmed. Similarly, having a bunch of to-dos and thoughts bounce around in my head makes me incredibly overwhelmed. Writing them down means I can get an overview of what it is I need to do.
• It helps you identify unhealthy patterns. Through regular journaling I have realised some of my unhealthy patterns and what triggers them. Before I had access to a therapist, journaling meant I could work through some of my problems myself, and try out different solutions.

In short, a notebook and a pen to write down your thoughts in whatever form feels right for you should be your new best friend.

Your Best Isn’t What You Think

I mentioned earlier that knowing that all I could do was my best helped me. But for many years, I had a warped view of what “doing my best” even meant. I always thought that my best was the overall best I could do, in ideal circumstances. In my head, “my best” was my absolute peak potential. Ultimately, this led to constant frustration because I always fell short of what I thought was my best because quite clearly, there was always room for improvement.

This is a trap. Don’t listen to your brain. It will ruin you and make you feel like a terrible and lazy person. You are not.

Trying my best means doing the best job that I can with the energy and resources I have at that moment. On most days, they will not be ideal conditions, so expecting those mythical perfect results is simply unrealistic. I am not going to lie, I still struggle with thinking I am lazy and should “just try harder”. But that’s a lie! My perfectionistic brain is lying to me. Unfortunately, figuring out what the truth is and if I really could try harder is…well, hard. It’s something I’m working on in therapy because this mindset has had far too much power over my life so far.

So I’d like you to invite to reflect on what “trying my best” means to you and if the answer you have is a realistic one that serves you. Don’t be like me, kids! (I’m not that old, I just get possessed by an old wise woman every once in a while)

Some Closing Words

Being a student is hard. Most education systems are incredibly broken and expect us to work unreasonable hours whilst also somehow having a fully rounded private life. Finding a way through this paradox sucks. But by checking in with ourselves and remembering that we are complex people with inherent worth outside of academic success, we give it a little less power over us.

We don’t have to be consumed by the shadows of dark academia. We can be badass students without having to suffer. Mental health often gets left aside when we talk about study tips and productivity. But it is an integral part of the whole deal! If we aren’t doing well mentally, everything else gets harder and less fun. So please, let’s all focus on taking care of our minds, too.

Let’s Chat

What are your go-to methods to take care of your mental health as a student?

I hope you have a lovely day,

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